Radical Markets

The main problem with this book is that it tends to look at evil, and rather than eradicating the evil, seeks to feed it in such a way that they hope it will be less awful. The immigration system is fraught with inefficiencies? Allow any person to import an immigrant labour and pay them less than the minimum wage as an indentured servant - it's ethical(TM) because this is already a thing under au pair visas in the US and the Arab world. Data logging by companies is intrusive and makes them powerful enough to manipulate democracies? Make them pay you in exchange for even greater intrusions. I think the most damning illustration of this is how often variations of this phrase show up in the book: “[the thing we just proposed] might be compared to slavery, wrongly in our opinion”.

The authors are fundamentally unwilling to accept what their own data is showing them. That said, they do offer an occasional interesting idea, and while many of these are unachievable (weighted per-issue voting in a participatory mass-democracy with a sort of tradeable 'voting credits' budget per voter), some of them do have promise (i.e. forbidding a company from owning interests in more than one area of a vertical market, but allowing them to own things in many markets).

All in all, the book might be worth it as a look at “problem areas”, even if it tends to get the problem itself wrong.

This is an excellent book full of well-designed mechanisms for finding good Nash equilibria in society. From taxing possessions based on how valuable their owners consider them (and being required to sell them at that price if someone asks,) to a quadratic voting scheme for balancing the weight of the many against the passion of the few, this book nails lots of weird ideas for what life could be like. But of course people are too risk-adverse to try anything of the nature, and so we'll be stuck with the status quo until the collapse of society.